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| Volume IX, March 2002, Number 1 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Just under the wire for this journal's winter deadline, a startling new foreign-policy strategy was unveiled by President Bush in his State of the Union address. No one seemed more startled than his own foreign policy team. The very next day presidential spinmeisters were trying to soften what they seemed to be trying to characterize as high rhetorical flair. The president identified three countries as the principal enemies of the United States: Iraq, Iran and North Korea, referring to them as an "axis of evil." An odd trio, they have little in common except that the United States has tried to isolate them and that they make missiles. One is dysfunctionally poor; two are historical enemies who fought a bitter war less than fifteen years ago. The two most dynamic and intimidating states in the Persian Gulf, far from having been contained, are apparently still capable of transfixing the greatest power the world has ever known.
There are voices predicting that, within the next five years, Iran will have a nuclear deterrent (see Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, December 3, 2001). That would alter the balance of power in the region. To counterbalance the threat from Iran before it is too late, Washington would normally try to bolster Iraq, but -- oops! -- Saddam Hussein is still in power. Therefore, the United States has to go after Iraq first and fast. With a pro-American regime installed in Baghdad, the apparent reasoning goes, Iran could be distracted while the counter-revolution that is thought to be seething below the surface did its work. Meanwhile, as in Afghanistan, an heir to the throne lives in exile, waiting patiently for his opportunity. Until very recently, the weakness of the opposition to Saddam, the Iraqi National Congress, had seemed to make a U.S.-sponsored war for the liberation of Iraq unlikely. The uniformed military of the United States also appeared reluctant to take on the risky business of overthrowing the Baathist regime and installing an acceptable successor.
Those Americans who had hoped for a bellicose message from the president were euphoric, lauding the speech as an ideological marker for the millennium. Others detected little more than politics as usual, an effort to translate backing for the president as commander in chief into broader political support. Interest groups capable of doing the president the most domestic damage were pleased: the defense-industrial base and the supporters of the Israeli right. Allies and friends abroad mostly responded with dismay at the prospect that a war on U.S.-identified "rogue states" might follow the "war on terrorism."
It remains to be seen what, if anything, the commander in chief really has in mind. After all, the campaign against terrorism has not been won. In his State of the Union speech, President Bush pointed to the lingering threat from tens of thousands of mysterious Al Qaeda sleepers, but most of them are still safe in their beds all over the world. Even in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and the bulk of his adherents, the main targets of our intervention, are at large, despite the vanquishing of the Taliban. The only way to find and punish these elusive "evildoers" is through old-fashioned, dogged local police work, nothing flashy. Their leaders, the masterminds of the September 11 plot, are as yet not demonstrably dead or caught, and the difficulties of locating them in Peshawar, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Hamburg, Madrid or London are considerable. To do the job, the United States needs allies, though none were acknowledged by the president (see the proceedings of the Council's Capitol Hill conference on Saudi Arabia, page 1; tape available from C-SPAN).
Reasonable people may differ on what should be done about the problem of amoral violence and mass murder in the world, but one thing the rest of the international community agrees on: solving the Palestine-Israel conflict is the single most important diplomatic duty the United States has undertaken. Washington has monopolized this task, excluding others as biased against our Jewish ally. President Bush has now apparently endorsed the Israeli enemies list as our own. This may prove to be more politically expedient than wise. Taking action against local movements engaged in "terrorism" as enemies of the United States gives them reason to collaborate with Al Qaeda against us. We have enemies enough already, as the horrors of September 11 showed. Why go out of our way to accumulate others?
A similar approach has not worked and is not working for the Israelis. As the Bush administration appears to endorse Ariel Sharon's imprisonment of Yasser Arafat and to globalize Israel's foes, a crisis of conscience among Israelis is becoming acute. The peace camp is in despair, but moral dissent is on the rise in some unexpected quarters.
A growing number of reserve officers in the Israel Defense Forces are signing onto an organized refusal to serve in the occupied territories. Their paid advertisement in the Israeli daily Haaretz is worth quoting:
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| . . . [W]e, having witnessed with our own eyes the bloody toll that the occupation takes on both sides of the divide; who have sensed how the orders we received erode every value we have imbibed in this country; who understand today that the price of the occupation is loss of the humane image of the IDF and corruption of the entire Israeli society; who know that the territories are not Israel, and that the Jewish settlements there will ultimately have to be evacuated; |
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| We hereby declare that we will no longer fight in the war for the welfare of the settlements in the territories. We will not continue to fight beyond the Green Line [Israel's pre-'67 border] for the purpose of dominating, expelling, starving and humiliating an entire people. |
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In this issue we have published the text of the message of conscience from a group of South African Jews that was read out at a session of Parliament. And the Israeli analyst Lev Grinberg has expanded his article from the centrist newspaper Maariv on the "arrogance of occupation." In the mainstream American press, more and more articles chronicle the grotesque injustices inflicted on the Palestinians (Chris Hedges in the October 2001 Harper's on the IDF outrages against Palestinian children in Gaza; Lee Hockstader's reportage in the January 31, 2002, Washington Post on the experiences that formed the first female Palestinian suicide bomber; Deborah Sontag in the February 3, 2002, New York Times Magazine on the Palestinians' suffering). Thomas Friedman of The New York Times recently called the settlements in the occupied territories "a cancer on the Jewish people," not just on the state of Israel. Sharon's hardest of all possible hard lines may be undermining more than the humane values of his religious tradition. It may be undermining the moral foundation of the Jewish state.
Anne Joyce
February 2002
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